The hidden costs of livestock

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>From Frances Moore Lappé's "Diet for a Small Planet":

If we are feeding millions of tons of grain to livestock, it must be
because it makes economic sense. Indeed, it does "make sense" under the
rules of our economy. But that fact might better be seen as the problem,
rather than the explanation that should put our concerns to rest. We got
hooked on grain-fed meat just as we got hooked on gas-guzzling automobiles.
Big cars "made sense" only when oil was cheap; grain-fed meat "makes sense"
only because the true costs of producing it are not counted.

But why is grain in America so cheap? If grain is cheap simply because
there is so much of it and it will go to waste unless we feed it to
livestock, doesn?t grain-fed meat represent a sound use of our resources?
Here we need to back up to another, more basic question: why is there so
much grain in the first place?

In our production system each farmer must compete against every other
farmer; the only way a farmer can compete is to produce more. Therefore,
every farmer is motivated to use any new technology?higher yielding seeds,
fertilizers, or machines?which will grow more and require less labor. In
the last 30 years crop production has virtually doubled as farmers have
adopted hybrid seeds and applied ever more fertilizer and pesticides. Since
the 1940s fertilizer use has increased fivefold, and corn yields have tripled.

But this production imperative is ultimately self-defeating. As soon as one
farmer adopts the more productive technology, all other farmers must do the
same or go out of business. This is because those using the more productive
technology can afford to sell their grain at a lower price, making up in
volume what they lose in profit per bushel. That means constant downward
pressure on the price of grain.

Since World War II real grain prices have sometimes fluctuated wildly, but
the indisputable trend has bc downward. The price of corn peaked at $6.43
per bushel 1947 and fell to about $2.00 in 1967. In the early 1970s prices
swung wildly up, but then fell to a low of $1.12 1977, or about one-sixth
the price 30 years earlier. (All prices are in 1967 dollars.)

This production imperative doesn?t fully explain why production of feed
doubled after 1950. In the 1950s the problem of agricultural surplus was
seen as too much certain crops, such as wheat, cotton, and tobacco; so
government programs subsidized cutbacks of certain crops, but allowed
farmers to expand their acreage in others, such as the feed crops barley,
soybeans, and grain sorghum. In Texas, for example, sorghum production
leaped sevenfold after cotton acreage was limited by law in the 1950s.

But neglected in this explanation of the low price of grain are the hidden
production costs which we and future generations are subsidizing: the
fossil fuels and water consumed, the groundwater mined, the topsoil lost,
the fertilizer resources depleted, and the water polluted.

FOSSIL FUEL COSTS

Agricultural production uses the equivalent of about 10 percent of all of
the fossil fuel imported into the United States.

Besides the cost of the grain used to produce meat, we can also measure the
cost of the fossil fuel energy used compared with the food value we
receive. Each calorie of protein we get from feedlot-produced beef costs us
78 calories of fossil fuel, as we learn from Figure 2, prepared from the
work of Drs. Marcia and David Pimentel at Cornell. Grains and beans are
from 22 to almost 40 times less fossil-fuel costly.

ENOUGH WATER TO FLOAT A DESTROYER

"We are in a crisis over our water that is every bit as important and deep
as our energy crisis," says Fred Powledge, who has just written the first
in-depth book on our national water crisis.

According to food geographer Georg Borgstrom, to produce a 1-pound steak
requires 2,500 gallons of water! The average U.S. diet requires 4,200
gallons of water a day for each person, and of this he estimates animal
products account for over 80 percent.

"The water that goes into a 1,000-pound steer would float a destroyer,"
Newsweek recently reported. When I sat down with my calculator, I realized
that the water used to produce just 10 pounds of steak equals the household
consumption of my family for the entire year.

Figure 3, based on the estimates of David Pimentel at Cornell, shows that
to produce 1 pound of beef protein can require as much as fifteen times the
amount of water needed to produce the protein in plant food.

MINING OUR WATER

Irrigation to grow food for livestock, including hay, corn, sorghum, and
pasture, uses 50 out of every 100 gallons of water "consumed" in the United
States. Other farm uses?mainly irrigation for food crops?add another 35
gallons, so agriculture?s total use of water equals 85 out of every 100
gallons consumed. (Water is "consumed" when it doesn?t return to our rivers
and streams.)

Over the past fifteen years grain-fed-beef production has been shifting
from the rain-fed Corn Belt to newly irrigated acres in the Great Plains.
Just four Great Plain states, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, have
accounted for over three-fourths of the new irrigation since 1964, and most
of that irrigation has been used to grow more feed. Today half of the
grain-fed beef in the Unit States is produced in states that depend for
irrigation on enormous underground lake called the Ogallala Aquifer."

But much of this irrigation just can?t last.

Rainwater seeps into this underground lake so slowly in some areas that
scientists consider parts of the aquifer a virtually nonrenewable resource,
much like oil deposits. With all the new irrigation, farmers now withdraw
more water each year from the Ogallala Aquifer than the entire annual flow
of the Colorado River. Pumping water at this rate is causing water tables
to drop six inches a year in some areas, six feet a year in others. And
lower water tables mean higher and higher costs to pump the water. The
Department of Agriculture predicts that in 40 years the number of irrigated
acres in the Great Plains will have shrunk by 30 percent.

In only two decades Texans have used up one-quarter of their groundwater.
Already some wells in northern Texas are running dry, and with rising fuel
costs, farmers are unable to afford pumping from deeper wells. Why is this
water being mined in Texas? Mostly to grow sorghum for the feedlots which
have sprung up in the last decade.

When most of us think of California?s irrigated acres, we visualize lush
fields growing tomatoes, artichokes, strawberries, and grapes. But in
California, the biggest user of underground water, more irrigation water is
used for feed crops and pasture than for all these specialty crops
combined. In fact, 42 percent of California?s irrigation goes to produce
livestock. Not only are water tables dropping, but in some parts of
California the earth itself is sinking as groundwater is drawn out.
According to a 1980 government survey, 5,000 square miles of the rich San
Joaquin Valley have already sunk, in some areas as much as 29 feet.

The fact that water is free encourages this mammoth waste. Whoever has the
$450 an acre needed to level the land and install pumping equipment can
take groundwater for nothing. The replacement cost?the cost of an equal
amount of water when present wells have run dry?is not taken into
consideration. This no-price, no-plan policy leads to the rapid depletion
of our resources, bringing the day closer when alternatives must be
found?but at the same time postponing any search for alternatives.

Ironically, our tax laws actually entice farmers to mine groundwater. In
Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico, landowners get a depletion allowance on the
groundwater to compensate for the fact that their pumping costs rise as
their groundwater mining lowers the water table. Moreover, the costs of
buying the equipment and sinking the well are tax-deductible. Irrigation
increases the value of the land enormously, but when the land is sold the
profits from the sale are taxed according to the capital gains provisions;
that is, only 40 percent of the difference between the original cost of the
farm and its sale price is taxed as ordinary income. The rest is not taxed
at all.

Few of us?and certainly not those whose wealth depends on the mining of
nonrenewable resources?can face the fact that soon we will suffer for this
waste of water. Donald Worster, author of 'Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains
in the 1930?s' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), interviewed a
landowner in Haskell County, Kansas, where $27.4 million in corn for feed
is produced on about 100,000 acres of land irrigated with groundwater. He
asked one of the groundwater-made millionaires, "What happens when the
irrigation water runs out?"

"I don?t think that in our time it can," the woman replied. "And if it
does, we?ll get more from someplace else. The Lord never intended us to do
without water."

Most of us think of soil as a renewable resource. After all, in parts of
Europe and Asia, haven?t crops been grown on the same land for thousands of
years? It?s true, soil should be a renewable resource; but in the United
States, we have not allowed it to be.

We are losing two bushels of topsoil for every bushel of corn harvested on
Iowa?s sloping soils, warned Iowa state conservation official William Brune
in 1976. Few listened. "It can take 100 to 500 years to create an inch of
topsoil," but under current farming practices in Iowa, an inch of topsoil
"can wash away in a single heavy rainstorm," Brune said after the spring
rains in 1980. On many slopes in Iowa we have only six inches of topsoil left.

Few would argue with Brune. Few would dispute that our topsoil loss is a
national catastrophe, or that in the last two decades we have backpedaled
on protecting our topsoil, or that in some places erosion is as bad as or
worse than during the Dust Bowl era. Few dispute that excessive erosion is
reducing the soil?s productive capacity, making chemical fertilizers ever
more necessary while their cost soars. The only dispute is how many
billions of dollars topsoil erosion is costing Americans and how soon the
impact will be felt in higher food prices and the end of farming on land
that could have been abundant for years to come.

Since we began tilling the fields in our prime farming states we have lost
one-third of our topsoil. Each year we lose nearly 4 billion tons of
topsoil from cropland, range, pasture, and forest land just because of
rain-related water erosion. That 4 billion tons could put two inches of
topsoil on all of the cropland in Pennsylvania, New York, and, New Jersey.
Adding wind erosion, estimated at 3 billion tons, we hit a total erosion
figure of nearly 7 billion tons a year.

Robin Hur is a mathematician and Harvard Business School graduate who has
spent the last year documenting the resource cost of livestock production
for his forthcoming book. "How much of our topsoil erosion is associated
with crops destined for livestock and overgrazing of rangeland?" I asked
him. "Most of it?about 5.9 billion tons," he calculates, including erosion
associated with exported feed grains. This is true not only because feed
crops cover half of our harvested acres, but because these crops,
especially corn and soybeans, are among the worst offenders when it comes
to soil erosion. According to the Department of Agriculture, one-quarter of
all soil erosion in the United States can be attributed to corn alone.

The loss of billions of tons of topsoil threatens our food security only if
we are losing topsoil faster than nature is building it. The difficulty is
knowing how fast nature works. The most widely accepted rule of thumb is
that we can lose up to five tons of topsoil per acre per year without
outpacing nature?s rebuilding rate?yet one-third of the nation?s cropland
already exceeds this limit, the Department of Agriculture estimates, and
one out of eight acres exceeds the limit almost three times over. This is
bad enough, but many soil scientists challenge the standard itself,
suggesting it applies only to the top layer of the soil. Soil formation
from the underlying bedrock may proceed ten times more slowly. If these
scientists are correct, we are mining the soil on most of our cropland.

LOST SOIL, LOWER YIELDS

In some areas we are already experiencing lower yields due to erosion and
the reduction in fertility it causes. The Department of Agriculture
estimates the annual dollar value of the loss just from water erosion at
$540 million to $810 million. Adding wind erosion may increase that
estimate by 30 percent.

"In our area of Nebraska you see hilltops eroded?completely naked," says
Marty Strange of the Center for Rural Affairs. "Yet farmers are still
getting 90 to 95 bushels of corn an acre. Farmers don?t believe they are
losing productivity." They use chemicals to make up for the soil?s lost
natural fertility, but the cost of fertilizer has risen 200 percent since
1967 and is likely to keep rising. Higher production costs must ultimately
mean higher food prices.

We also pay in our taxes, for billions of dollars have gone toward
conservation measures (although this spending is shrinking, while the need
increases). Moreover, the soil washed from farmlands ends up in rivers,
streams, and reservoirs. Dredging sediment from rivers and harbors, the
reduction in the useful life of reservoirs, and water purification?these
costs amount to $500 million to $1 billion a year.

Thus, the direct and indirect costs of soil erosion already approach $2
billion a year.

BUT WHY?

Why is soil erosion accelerating, despite 34 Department of Agriculture
programs related to soil and water conservation? There are several reasons:

*** the increased tillage of soil so fragile it probably should have
remained uncultivated. The government estimates that 43 percent of the land
used for row crops in the Corn Belt is composed of highly erodible soils.

*** the increased planting of row crops, especially the feed crops corn and
soybeans, which make the land particularly susceptible to erosion.

*** the growing neglect of conservation practices, including the removal of
shelterbelts planted during the Dust Bowl era to protect the soil. By 1975
the total real value of soil conservation improvements had deteriorated
over 20 percent from its peak in 1955.

These are the reasons, but what are the causes? Unfortunately, they lie in
the economic givens that most Americans take as normal and proper. Squeezed
between ever higher costs of production and falling prices, farmers must
increase their production. They plant more acres, including marginal land
susceptible to erosion, and they plant what brings the highest return, even
if this means continuous planting of the most erosion-inducing crops, corn
and soybeans. "The most erosive production system?continuous corn?produces
the highest net income," according to researchers at the University of
Minnesota.

FERTILIZERS: BECOMING IMPORT-DEPENDENT

To determine a price for grain which reflects all its costs would also mean
looking at the fertilizers required to mask our lost fertility and
continually increase production. Higher yields and continuous cropping
deplete soil nutrients, so that ever greater quantities of fertilizer must
be used. This vicious circle caused our nation?s use of chemical fertilizer
to increase fivefold between the 1940s and the 1970s. Just in the last ten
years, the use of ammonia (for nitrogen fertilizer) has increased by almost
200 percent and that of potash by almost 300 percent.50 Corn, the major
national feed grain, which occupies about 23 percent of all our cropland,
uses more fertilizer than any other crop?about 40 percent of the total.

Because fertilizer has been relatively cheap, farmers have been encouraged
to apply ever greater quantities in their desperate struggle to produce. As
with topsoil and groundwater, we squander fertilizer resources today
without considering the consequences tomorrow. One of the consequences of
our heavy consumption of fertilizer is increasing dependence on imports.
Americans might be alarmed at how our dependence on imported strategic
metals can be used to justify U.S. political or even military intervention
abroad. Americans would probably be even more alarmed about becoming
dependent on imported food. But is being dependent on the fertilizer needed
to produce food really much different?

Let?s look at the three major types of fertilizer:

NITROGEN FERTILIZER: We won?t run out of nitrogen, since it makes up about
78 percent of our air, but the price of natural gas, used to make ammonia,
the most common nitrogen fertilizer, has risen so rapidly that we have
begun to import ammonia from countries with cheap supplies of natural gas.
We now import about 20 percent of our supplies.

POTASH: Today we import about 85 percent of our potash (from Canada), and
by the year 2000 we are expected to import 90 percent.

PHOSPHATE FERTILIZER: The U.S. is the world?s leading producer, but our
high-grade reserves will probably be exhausted over the next 30 to 40 years
at the current rate of use, according to a 1979 government report. "We will
probably move from assured self-sufficiency and a dominant exporter
position to one of increasing dependency on possibly unreliable foreign
sources of supply," says the ominous report. "Since phosphates are a
fundamental necessity to agriculture . . . the situation . . . is somewhat
analogous to that now being experienced with oil".

LIVESTOCK POLLUTION

Some people believe that although we feed enormous quantities of high-grade
plant food to livestock with relatively little return to us as food, there
is really no loss: After all, we live in a closed system, don?t we? Animal
waste returns to the soil, providing nutrients for the crops that the
animals themselves will eventually eat, thus completing a natural
ecological cycle.

Unfortunately, it doesn?t work that way anymore. manure is not returned to
the land. Animal waste in the United States amounts to 2 billion tons
annually, equivalent to the waste of almost half of the world?s human
population. Much of the nitrogen-containing waste from live stock is
converted into ammonia and into nitrates, which leach into the groundwater
beneath the soil or run directly into surface water, thus contributing to
high nitrate level in the rural wells which tap the groundwater. In stream
and lakes, high levels of waste runoff contribute to oxygen depletion and
algae overgrowth. American livestock contribute five times more harmful
organic waste to water pollution than do people, and twice that of
industry, estimates food geographer Georg Borgstrom.


Louis Proyect
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